I'm Your Man

by

Leonard Cohen

Edit

I was introduced to Leonard Cohen nearly a decade ago in my college freshman rhetoric class. The professor asked us to bring in samples of something that we considered poetry. Someone brought in Everybody Knows, and I have been a Cohen fan ever since.

Cohen's voice fits his dry, black, sense of humor and his grasp of the power of bitter irony like the right pair of sunglasses fit a Mafioso kingpin. They become one and the same.

My favorites on this album have changed over the years, a testament to the longevity of this work. Everybody Knows is one of the best songs ever written, and Tower of Song is pure brilliance. Feel free to skip Jazz Police, but have patience with Take This Waltz and I'm Your Man. You will be rewarded if you give them the chance to grow on you. They most assuredly will.

This album is my favorite of the Cohen releases. It may not have the classic sound of many of his earlier albums, but his ability to overlay lyrics like

"Now in Vienna there's ten pretty women

There's a shoulder where Death comes to cry

There's a lobby with nine hundred windows

There's a tree where the doves go to die

There's a piece that was torn from the morning

And it hangs in the Gallery of Frost"

with an underlying accompaniment that is at the same time electronic and string driven is genius, pure and simple. Cohen has the ability of the timeless masters to maintain his style and keep current gracefully.

Mr. Cohen says it best. "I was born like this, I had no choice

I was born with the gift of a golden voice"

Do yourself a favor. Spend an evening in the dark listening to this album over a glass of good wine. You won't regret it.

Five Stars only because they won't give me six.

-HawkeyeGK

Laughin Lenny writes great simple melodies and brilliant complex lyrics, but he doesn't seem to take a firm hand when it comes to arranging and producing his records. When he's got sympathetic collaborators who give him folk arrangements, the albums are brilliant. When his collaborators try to bring him "up to date", the results can be very frustating.

The songwriting on "I'm Your Man" is peerless - dry and sombre moralism, witty and self-deprecating. But the production, which may have been "industry standard" in 1988, is now so dated it's a trial to listen to this from start to end. Tinny drum machines, synthesiser washes, cheesy female vocalists. Not everything suffers equally: "Everybody Knows" has a beautiful flamenco guitar counterpoint, and "Take this Waltz" features gorgeous violin and co-lead vocals from Jennifer Warnes. But it's tough to sit through the stuttering artificial drums and sweetly anonymous backing vocals of "Jazz Police".

This is one of the strongest available doses of Lenny's worldview, and I'd love this album like crazy if I could block out the 80's veneer.